A recent survey of WebJunction users showed some interesting statistics on use of various online tools by librarians (the write-up is at at "Library Staff Report Their Use of Online Tools").

The trend from the survey indicates that social media (such as Facebook) is making inroads on email as a communication tool. Of particular interest to me is the finding that RSS feeds are used daily or weekly by only 24% of respondents and used never by 50%. Blogs are used daily or weekly by only 27%, and never by 40%.

I know I spend much less time reading blogs (and, as those of you who read RSS4Lib in its native blog for or via RSS might notice, writing for one). I do wonder how much RSS usage is un-noticed or un-recognized by respondents; as RSS (and XML in general) become the way data move, do its consumers care how the data appear where they're consumed?

The survey results highlight differences between academic and public librarians (academic librarians are more likely to use online tools than their public counterparts) and a series of interesting differences between urban and rural librarians.

Google Chrome for Mac came out of beta today (see "Google Chrome for Mac: Ready, beta, now stable!") with many new features, but not with built-in RSS support. Even my first-generation iPhone can do better than that (granted, with a redirect through an Apple server to parse the XML of the feed into something intelligible). An RSS feed still displays as a jumble of text:

Not that I spend a lot of time reading RSS feeds in my browser, but if I click on one (intentionally or otherwise), I really ought not get gibberish. If Google intends Chrome to be a serious competitor in a marketplace of choice for Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Safari, it really ought not leave users in the lurch. This is very un-Google-like behavior.

This is just the most recent in my series of rants about Google Chrome and RSS here, here, and here.

Found a new-to-you blog that you want to read, but you don't want to get sucked into it for the next few hours? RSS Replay looks like the tool for you. Give it an RSS feed and how often you want it to give you a new post, and it will do the rest. You can specify a new item from the backfile every day, every few days, or other intervals. You can also set a PageRank filter so you only see posts that have PageRanks above a specific threshold (all, good, great, or best).

This brings "slow reading" to a much different level!

Have you even wanted to subscribe to an RSS feed in Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, Bloglines or Google Reader (or anywhere else, for that matter), but discover that the feed is inconveniently served from behind a login-protected server? We all have, I think. Well, now a free web service allows you to do just that. As convenient as it is, this is a spectacularly poor idea.

FreeMyFeed handily takes care of those pesky login problems. You give it your feed URL, your login, and your password. It then gives you an alternate URL at FreeMyFeed that contains your login information in an encoded way. FreeMyFeed then acts as a proxy, grabbing the feed without storing your login credentials on its own server, and passing it along to your reader:

So I created a COMPLETELY FAKE login for this blog's feed. The login does not exist, does not work, and is (of course) not a real login to anything: username rss4lib and password temp1234. The FreeMyFeed link that encodes this is:

http://freemyfeed.com/feed/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5yc3M0bGliLmNvbS9pbmRleC54bWw6OnJzczRsaWI6OkxzUGcwWHRrRktDUytJdkFrUTFMN0RvNk5BPT0=

Well, it is encrypted, but there's usually a good reason that a feed is behind a login. This takes those feeds and puts them out in the public, where any search engine find them, index them, and expose your organization's secure information. End runs around reasonable security are poor choices. I would recommend that, if your organization has RSS behind a login, that you work with your technical group to block FreeMyFeed from accessing your site.

To their credit, there is a fairly explicit disclaimer of the risks on the FreeMyFeed front page, that includes a warning to be careful and not to share your personalized URL with anyone (other than the feed readers, of course). So if you must use this tool, use it only on your own browser, not on an aggregator to minimize the sharing of an all-access URL to your feed. Don't be tempted.

Looks like the upgrade went smoothly. Please let me know in the comments or by email to rss4lib@gmail.com if you see anything wonky that you want to report.